Where Did All The NIBY's Go?

Once I was married to Bonnie we lived in the little village of Weston. We rented our very first one bedroom apartment signing a one year lease back in June 1982. Our 26th floor apartment had amazing and unobstructed easterly views of Toronto from our large and spacious balcony. The newly built building had been finished just a few months before we signed our lease. It was perfect timing as Bonnie would now be able to live there while we furnished our new apartment over the summer before our upcoming October wedding day. Most importantly it would give us the privacy back that we had both been missing for the previous six months.

We were both earning pretty good money, but we were now spending every cent we earned. Our mounting wedding expenses, furnishing our new apartment plus our everyday living expenses was where we spent all of our money that summer. We had purchased our king size waterbed and we were already putting it to good use. Everything was slowly starting to come together for us. Bonnie and I eagerly looked forward to the lifetime journey that we would soon be embarking on.

Just over a year after we were married the ceiling in our bedroom began to drip water from the light fixture. The water would start dripping every time it rained and the fixture was right above our waterbed. The waterbed was not at all that easy to move to another part of the bedroom. It was very annoying to say the least so I decided that I would attempt to fix the leak myself. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I was able to easily remove the drop ceiling panels. On further examination I determined that the leak was coming from a small crack in the actual concrete ceiling right where the electrical box for the light fixture was also located.

No worries it should be an easy fix, I thought to myself as I headed over to the hardware store.

Within a few hours the black liquid tar-like waterproof solution that I applied had already dried and I was about to apply a second coat. I was at home alone standing on the waterbed while trying to balance myself which was almost impossible. Just as I was checking out how dry the first coat was the complete patch fell down right onto my face. I was so furious; I now had black sticky goo everywhere on my face, in my hair and on my shirt. Immediately, I marched right down to the management office in the lobby while I was still covered with the tar. I am sure that I must have looked absolutely ridiculous and I could see that one of the ladies in the office was snickering at me. I told the building manager that Bonnie and I would be breaking our lease and we would be moving out at the end of the month.

I slammed the door as I exited the office. The building manager said nothing, she knew how pissed off I was and by the end of the month Bonnie and I had already signed a new lease in an older building just a couple of blocks away. It was a larger two bedroom apartment and I could throw pucks from our eleventh floor balcony onto the roof of Weston Arena where I played hockey on Monday nights.

Back then Weston was a beautiful place to live and raise a family. It had a real small town country like atmosphere even though you were living within Canada’s largest city. Today because of our lax Federal immigration laws the Village of Weston has become one of the poorest and highest crime ridden neighborhoods in Toronto. Simply put Weston now resembles more of a ghetto than the quaint little village where I once lived back in the 80's.

We lived in two apartments over a six year period, but I was more than eager to get the fuck out of Weston once changes began creeping in. The neighborhood demographics were changing rather quickly and it was not for the better. It seemed like overnight hundreds of refugees and immigrants from Somalia and Ethiopia had literally taken over the whole neighborhood. For me the drive up Weston Road from my Lawrence Avenue apartment felt as if I was living in another country altogether.

I now hated living in Weston.

With the deluge of immigrants calling themselves new Canadians there would also be big changes in all the area businesses. Within a decade of us leaving, gone were all the little places that made Weston such a unique place to live, shop and eat. They were now replaced with multi-cultural stores, eateries and churches catering to the areas new Islamic Muslim demographics.

Although I later discovered that Weston could be a sketchy place long before Bonnie, me and all the newcomers had arrived.

While Bonnie and I rented our second apartment on Lawrence Avenue, we were living in apartment #1103. When you got off the elevator on the 11th floor there were three apartments directly in front and we lived in the one to the left. The middle apartment was #1104 and the one to the right was #1105.

Apartment #1105 had a very noticeable large steel panel plate around the door handle and lock. It was an odd look and I always wondered why if a repair was needed management never just replaced the door. The bolted on steel plate was quite ugly and it stuck out like a sore thumb. Other than that ugly steel plate nothing else about the building really bothered me.

Years later after I moved out of Weston and while working on my ice cream route I got chatting with one of the receivers at an A&P store. We discovered that we had both lived in the Weston and Lawrence area. We both had lived in the same building and to boot we both lived on the 11th floor. After telling Glen who was a biker type guy that I lived in apartment #1103 he told me that he had lived in #1105. Almost immediately the ugly steel plate flashed into my head and I asked Glen if the plate was on the door when he lived there. It was then that Glen told me the whole story behind the ugly steel plate on his front door.

Glen was not home at the time but the girl he shared the apartment with was home along with three other men. He explained that it was a stolen goods deal that went bad and when it was all said and done the three men who were there were all murdered inside the apartment. Glen's roommate was shot twice in the head and was found on the balcony. She survived.

On July 15th 1977 two masked men had broken into the apartment by smashing the front door lock with a sledgehammer. Hence the reason for the ugly steel plate that was needed to repair the door. Within minutes the two shooters were fleeing down the stairwell and days later they were apprehended by police.

The stairwell was the exact same stairwell where I had climbed stairs hundreds of times during the five years while I lived there. It was the exact same stairwell where two other men have since been murdered, also shot dead since I moved out in 1988. I have never been one for accepting or liking change especially when changes make me feel like a minority living in my own country. I have absolutely no doubt that leaving Weston when we did was one of the smartest decisions I have ever made in my life.

Today I no longer go into the Weston ghetto. Over the years there have been numerous drive by shootings and many innocent people have been killed. It's too bad there wasn’t the NIBY (Not In My Backward) movement back when I was living in Weston. It just might have remained a quaint little village and a great place to live and raise a family.

*Update – As I write this story there have been three more murders at my old Lawrence Ave building, five in total since I left. All those killed were young black men and all three had been victims of gun violence.